Politics does strange things to people. It is presently morphing Philip Gunn into Tate Reeves.
Gunn, Mississippi’s speaker of the House, has adopted some of the strong-armed legislative tactics for which Reeves, during his time as lieutenant governor, was well-known. If a senator crossed Reeves while he headed the Senate, chances were good that senator would pay with diminished influence over what transpired at the Capitol. Reeves negotiated hard with the House, rarely giving in when the two chambers disagreed.
It made him both feared and disliked, but it didn’t keep him from winning a promotion to the state’s highest office because his positions have usually been in tune with the conservative majority of voters in Mississippi.
Gunn is starting to show some of those same uncompromising, dislikable traits.
He has completely closed his mind to Medicaid expansion, no matter the abundance of studies showing that providing government health insurance to the working poor would pay for itself while improving the lives of a couple hundred thousand adults. Even as modest a change as allowing mothers to stay on Medicaid for a year after giving birth, rather than the minimum two months, gets only a cold-hearted rebuff from him.
Gunn is so adamant on getting his way on his signature cause — elimination of the state income tax — that he is willing to jeopardize at least some of the $1.8 billion the state has received in coronavirus relief money. He won’t allow the House to consider Senate proposals on how to start spending that money until an agreement is reached on a tax-cut plan that would presumably be closer to the House’s version than the more fiscally cautious Senate’s.
What is strange about Gunn’s transformation is that he is supposedly acting the bully in order to set himself up for a run against Reeves in 2023. If Gunn is successful in this battle with the Senate, though, odds are he will only be increasing the likelihood of the incumbent governor’s reelection.
Reeves was championing the elimination of the income tax long before Gunn took up the cause. Gunn probably can’t make it happen without Reeves’ cooperation. Already the House speaker has modified his original concept of a tax swap — lower income taxes in exchange for higher sales taxes — to what Reeves has proposed: eliminating the income tax without any offsets elsewhere in the tax code.
Cutting taxes and opposing Medicaid expansion are not the only issues on which Gunn and Reeves have been nearly indistinguishable. Both pushed for banning the teaching of critical race theory because they knew it would appeal to the GOP’s ultraconservative base, even though they could find only one place in Mississippi — an elective course at the University of Mississippi Law School — where the theory is being taught and would be hard-pressed to explain what the theory postulates.
The question for Gunn is this: If you have decided to become a Tate Reeves clone, why would voters opt for you over him? They might as well stick with the genuine article.
